The Next Level_ Alexander R

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The Next Level: Alexander R. Galloway’s“The Interface Effect”

The Interface Effect

author: Alexander R. Galloway

publisher: Polity Press

pub date: 01.22.2013

pp: 200

tags: Philosophy & Critical Theory ,Cultural Studies , CulturalStudies , Media Theory

“MEDIA DETERMINE OUR SITUATION,” thelate German media theorist Friedrich Kittlerobserved at the beginning of his 1986 bookGramophone, Film, Typewriter. What Kittlermeant by this pronouncement is that media such as radio, cinema, andtelevision change our sense of space, time, and social relationships; theycondition human experiences and perceptions. In the 1940s, in the midst ofcryptographic warfare and the construction of the first digital, program-drivencomputers, it might have still been possible to take stock of the global media“situation,” Kittler suggested; by the mid-1980s, however, he found himselfwriting from within an oblique media environment.

From our own perspective at the beginning of 2013, the global situation(especially as it is experienced by many people living in the First World) mayseem more mediated than ever. With the advent of the World Wide Web in the1990s and the proliferation of mobile devices since the turn of the 21st century,we have experienced extraordinary transformations in the frequency, speed,scale, and quality of human communication. More and more, our daily lives arestructured by emails, message boards, texts, instant messages, videoconferences, social networking sites, and screen-based entertainments.

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According to 2012 estimates, Facebook has now reached more than one billionactive members, the Internet is nearing 2.5 billion users, and worldwide cellphone subscriptions have exceeded the six billion mark. Once the tools of fringecommunities and wealthy institutions, digital and mobile media now take acentral, even infrastructural, role in shaping an increasingly informatic society.

For many Americans, then, a great deal of contemporary life is mediated byinterfaces, including laptop, smartphone, and television screens. That thisperpetual mediation so often goes unexamined speaks to the importance ofAlexander R. Galloway’s new monograph The Interface Effect. Galloway’sambitious book aspires to be not only a theory of interfaces but also a broaderrethinking of the field of “new media studies,” an academic discipline withprecursors in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams inthe 1960s that emerged properly with scholarship produced alongside the riseof web culture of the 1990s. In recent years, new media scholars have focusedon topics such as software (Lev Manovich, Matthew Fuller), hardware (FriedrichKittler, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun), new forms of social interaction (Geert Lovink,Sherry Turkle), information networks (Tiziana Terranova, Eugene Thacker),digital technologies and human affects (Mark Hansen, Jodi Dean), developmentplatforms (Ian Bogost, Nick Montfort), and the emergence of electronic literatureand new digital art forms (Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins). Galloway hasmade important contributions to a number of these conversations with previousbooks about the politics of code and digital media (Protocol), computernetworks (The Exploit, cowritten with Thacker), and videogames (Gaming). TheInterface Effect returns to all of these areas while also analyzing other topics,such as the relationship between software and ideology, the aesthetics ofinformation visualizations, and the “gold farming” phenomenon that hasinfluenced the cultures of massively multiplayer online games.

As its title suggests, Galloway’s newest book concerns media interfaces. To itscredit, it provides neither a formal definition nor an exhaustive taxonomy of thisconcept. An interface, Galloway argues, is not a stable object; it is a multiplicityof processes. In other words, an interface is not merely a laptop LCD or atelevision screen. It is not the Windows 8 operating system or Mac OS X. It isnot a hypermediated heads-up display of the contemporary videogame with itsmyriad forms of information (health levels, map position, speed, time, messagingoptions, and so on). Galloway mentions many such objects in The InterfaceEffect, but does not dwell on them. In the first place, he observes, media studiesscholars have too often privileged screens and displays. This disproportionatefocus on visual interfaces ignores other critical objects, such as “nonopticalinterfaces (keyboard, mouse, controller, sensor); data in memory and data on

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disk; executable algorithms; networking technologies and protocols; and the listcontinues.”

But it’s not merely that media studies has been focusing on the wrong objects; itgoes wrong, Galloway claims, by sticking to the matter and form of objects at all.An interface, for Galloway, is “not a thing”; it is “always an effect” — a techniqueof mediation or interaction. The conceptual move here departs from the object-centered approach taken by critics such as McLuhan, for whom media objectsare technological extensions of the human body; and his position differs, too,from Kittler’s contention that media objects carry their own technical logics thatonly intersect obliquely and occasionally with human perceptions. Gallowaydraws from a different philosophical tradition, including thinkers such as MartinHeidegger, which “views techne as technique, art, habitus, ethos, or livedpractice.” In this view, media are not “objects or substrates” but rather“practices of mediation.” While his approach risks casting too wide a net (what,we might ask, is not mediation?), it also promotes a form of thought that is opento ongoing interactions that unfold in complex systems. Thus, Galloway’smethod shifts attention from stable interface objects to dynamic interfaceprocesses. A computer, from this perspective, is no longer a media machine thatstandardizes and absorbs all other media, including print texts, audiorecordings, films, and games; it is a process of translation among differentstates.

Galloway’s characterization of interfaces as processes has numerousimplications for his broader approach to new media studies. The Interface Effectbuilds on the work of Marxist critical theorists such as Fredric Jameson, newmedia scholars such as Wendy Chun, and Galloway’s own work in earlier bookssuch as Protocol. Galloway juxtaposes his distinctly political method with theone Lev Manovich adopts in his groundbreaking text The Language of NewMedia (2001). “Manovich’s strength,” Galloway observes, “lies in thedescription of digital technologies as poetic and aesthetic objects”; he isparticularly interested in formal innovations of new media (defining, for instance,what he sees as the five fundamental aesthetic properties of digital technology:numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding). Inplace of this formalist focus on the “poetics” of new media, Galloway prefers amore political and historical method. For him, the limitation of Manovich’sapproach — which, despite maintaining some historical dimensions, often treatsnew media as aesthetic objects that have essential qualities — is that itobscures the contingencies of how people actually discuss, develop, and usenew media in concrete practices.



The Interface Effect proposes a different approach to new media. “[D]igitalmedia ask a question,” Galloway writes, “to which political interpretation is theonly coherent answer.” If politics — understood broadly to include theorganization of a common world not only through state governance but also inrelations among actors within families, work environments, oppositionalmovements, and other social forms — is in large part a question of mediation,then the study of new media cannot ever be primarily formalist or apolitical.Digital environments, from social media sites to virtual worlds to videoconferencing spaces, both enable and limit different kinds of politicalencounters. For example, in recent years, commentators from Evgeny Morozovand Malcolm Gladwell to Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri (to name just a few)have addressed the use of Twitter and Facebook in revolutionary situations.Some critics have argued that the effects of social media in Moldova in 2009,Egypt in 2011, or the United States during the ongoing Occupy Movement havebeen overstated for a variety of strategic reasons. Other critics have praised theways that networked media have, in these same situations, emphasizedinterconnection and promoted collaboration as a technique of contemporarypolitical action. In any case, as Galloway’s statement emphasizes, politicalinterpretation is unavoidable, even fundamental, to discussions of the concreteuses of new media. Political discussions of digital technologies and culturesremain urgent, especially in a historical moment when some of the discoursesurrounding new media studies and promoting the Digital Humanities remainsuntenably utopian, frequently inflated, and insufficiently critical of the ideologiesof data.

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How, then, does Galloway’s notion of “the interface effect” promote a politicallyoriented form of new media studies? An interface, for him, becomes a techniquefor thought: an “allegorical device” that makes the social world accessible in anage of information. We are accustomed to thinking of an interface as a user-friendly surface that hides the depths of code; for Galloway, though, it serves away of thinking in terms of interpenetrating “levels” or “layers.” Let’s take theexample of the heads-up display for the Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game World of Warcraft, which Galloway mentions in his chapter “TheUnworkable Interface.” World of Warcraft is a fantasy-themed virtual world that,at its most popular moment, claimed a community of approximately 12 millionmonthly subscribers who inhabited its space for an average of 20 to 30 hours aweek. While it is often called a “game,” World of Warcraft is more properly anonlinear world that contains within itself numerous games, objectives, andactivities. Amidst other pleasures, such as role-playing, narrative exposition, and



commerce, this world promotes a competitive process of “leveling up” whichplayers (as individual characters and organized “guilds”) pursue through ludicquests.

World of Warcraft could certainly be interpreted as a popular digitalentertainment, or a software object. But, for Galloway, it is something more. Anallegorical approach suggests multiple political processes at work in this digitalenvironment. Earlier cultural forms such as novels or films can be said to reveala world and, to varying degrees, to immerse an audience within it. Instead ofexposing or unveiling, World of Warcraft does something else. It simulatesworlds. As Galloway observes:

In contrast to the cinema, in order to be in a relation with theworld informatically, one must erase the world, subjecting it tovarious forms of manipulation, preemption, modeling andsynthetic transformation. The computer takes our ownsuperlative power over worlds as the condition of possibility forthe creation of worlds. Our intense investment in worlds — ouracute fact finding, our scanning and data mining, our spideringand extracting — is the precondition for how worlds arerevealed. The promise is not one of revealing something as itis, but in simulating a thing so effectively that “what it is”becomes less and less necessary to speak about, not becauseit is gone for good, but because we have perfected a languagefor it.

Instead of knowing a world, designers and players of World of Warcraft form aworld through software expansions, ludic actions, and networked interactions.These processes are part of the reason Galloway contends that, unlike cinema,the computer cannot be considered through the philosophical category of“ontology” and approached at the level of sensory experience. Instead, thecomputer is “an ethic” that can only be analyzed through human and machinicactions, processes, and effects. Through virtual worlds such as World ofWarcraft, we see the decline of “ideology” in Marxist philosopher LouisAlthusser’s sense of “an imaginary relationship to real conditions.” In place of anolder category of ideology, we now have a process of computer modeling that,in Galloway’s phrase, offers us something we might call simulation: “anideological relationship to ideological conditions.”



The interface effects of World of Warcraft help us grasp this move from ideologyto simulation (and from ontology to ethics) in more concrete terms. For example,the screen image with which the World of Warcraft player interacts tells ussomething about the political form of a computer-generated world.

The game’s changing image is not an interface in the sense of a “window” or a“screen” that transports a player into a fictional world. Certainly, the imageincludes the beautifully rendered fantasy world of Azeroth with its orcs anddraenei, its enchanted forests and treacherous caves. However, as Gallowayobserves, there is also the “thin, two-dimensional overlay containing icons, text,progress bars, and numbers.” Immediacy and hypermediacy exist side-by-side.They also interact through the game’s actions and objectives.

The importance of this 2D heads-up display, and its relationship to the 3Dfantasy world, suggests a distinctly contemporary politics: namely, the interplayof layers foregrounds the centrality of information-oriented labor in the early21st century. As Galloway concludes, World of Warcraft is “not simply a fantasylandscape of dragons and epic weapons but a factory floor, an information-agesweatshop, custom tailored in every detail for cooperative ludic labor.” Thecentrality of information processing, at the level of the display, repeats at thelevel of gameplay and mechanics. The process of “leveling up” an avatar byaccumulating “experience points” requires players to engage in repetitive andoften addictive mechanics — a form of activity that the game industry aptly calls“grinding.” Galloway’s analysis thus treats interfaces as processes throughwhich players engage with a social world — a media “situation” in Kittler’ssense — that in many ways exceeds human understanding.

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Many of the interfaces Galloway considers in The Interface Effect — NormanRockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait,” HyperText Markup Language, visualizations ofthe Internet, Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, and the Fox television series 24among them — operate as mediations of what the philosopher Gilles Deleuzehas called “societies of control.” Since this concept is central to Galloway’sargument, and raises a number of important questions and implications, itdeserves a brief explanation. In a short essay first published in 1990, Deleuzedeveloped the notion of “societies of control” as an elaboration on MichelFoucault’s earlier idea of “disciplinary societies.” In Discipline and Punish(1975), Foucault posited that the 18th century brought with it a new form ofpower that became visible in all types of institutions and sites of confinement,including the school, the factory, the psychiatric institution, the hospital, the



army barrack, and the prison. The form of power that emerged in this periodwas no longer based on the older model of top-down sovereignty. Withoutlosing its older repressive character altogether, power grew increasinglyproductive of new forms of life. Power became distributed across institutionsand turned inwards, transforming into a kind of self-supervision.

Deleuze’s insight is that, following World War II, another major historical shift inpower took place, giving rise to a shift from “discipline” to what he calls“control.” Unlike earlier sovereignty or institutional discipline, control took placenot in molds or confined sites but rather in modulations or dynamic networks.The shift from disciplinary to control societies has entailed manytransformations: from factories to multinational corporations, from the discretematerial labor of industrialism to the flexible information labor of Post-Fordism,from singular signatures to passwords, from uniform consumption to themonetization of diverse affects, from a separation of work and leisure time to aperpetual blurring of these domains, and so on. “One of the key consequencesof the control society,” Galloway observes, “is that we have moved from acondition in which singular machines produce proliferations of images, into acondition in which multitudes of machines produce singular images” (italicshis). This shift, to put it in more concrete media terms, can be traced in thetransition from cinema to Wikipedia: from auteur production to crowdsourcing.To return for a moment to the example of WoW, a player of this game belongsprecisely to a control (rather than a disciplinary) society insofar as she createscontent, scans and sorts information, manages guilds, and laboriously grindsher way to more experience points.

To be sure, digital media have by no means caused or determined the shifts insocial, economic, and political life represented by “societies of control,” but theyhave co-emerged with them. Technological processes and interface effects thusprovide optimal means for making sense of the complex political situation inwhich we find ourselves today. This analytical effort is one to which TheInterface Effect, through a series of careful close readings and compellingphilosophical reflections, makes a significant contribution. One of the intriguingpropositions that Galloway puts forward is that “we do not yet have a critical orpoetic language in which to represent the control society.” The violence andexcess of the disciplinary society, with its institutions and confined sites, haslong since been rendered aesthetically. We see the methods of disciplinarysocieties, for instance, in Foucault’s own description of the architecture of the18th-century Panopticon prison or, more recently, in the infamous photographsfrom Abu Ghraib. However, Galloway contends, the dynamics of thecontemporary control society and its distributed information networks have not



been captured in comparable detail. They remain, at least for the time being,unrepresented and “unrepresentable.” Galloway suggests the extreme difficultyof representing the informatic present in many ways. One compelling exampleconcerns information visualizations.

Such visualizations, he argues, remain aesthetically uniform. These mapsconsistently take on the familiar node and link structures of networks,regardless of whether they are mapping the Internet, neural networks, financesystems, or representations of global viral transmission.

Though I find Galloway’s observations persuasive, I found myself asking, as Iread The Interface Effect, whether the control society and the networkedpresent have, in fact, remained completely unrepresentable to date.Contemporary literature and popular forms have engaged extensively in what Ihave elsewhere called “network aesthetics.” For example, we seerepresentations and intensifications of the control society in novels such as DonDeLillo’s Underworld, films such as Stephen Gaghan’s film Syriana, andtelevision shows such as David Simon’s The Wire. Galloway himself mentionsattempts at information visualization, such as Gehry’s Stata Center or the “glitchart” of the Jodi collective, that depart from the predictable network maps, but hefinds them less engaged, at an algorithmic level, with the qualities of aninformatic era. Though I share Galloway’s wariness about the uniformity ofcontemporary network poetics, I would also posit that a number of contemporaryart pieces have started to offer substantive and varied responses to Deleuze’ssocieties of control. These works — which include a variety of procedurally-richdigital game experiments with networks (thatgamecompany’s videogameJourney), affect (Jordan Magnuson’s “notgame” Loneliness), information (avariety of transmedia Alternate Reality Games, including my own Speculation,codesigned with Katherine Hayles and Patrick LeMieux), and the types ofsubjects produced social media and their interfaces (Ian Bogost’s satirical CowClicker) — have exceeded the limits of the all-too-common informationvisualizations that Galloway discusses. Nevertheless, even with these emergingcounter-examples, Galloway’s central point remains convincing: it is difficult tofind an aesthetic alternative to today’s dominant realization of the informationnetwork.

The Interface Effect raises many critical questions about the ways thatcontemporary human beings mediate a historical present that invariably eludesus. The book also meditates, intensely and extensively, on methods throughwhich we might access that present. Despite a widespread movement by manyscholars in recent years away from critical traditions inaugurated by Karl Marx

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and Sigmund Freud, Galloway insists on the continued usefulness of theseearlier theories for understanding our hypermediated moment. We live in ahistorical period, after all, that is characterized by the assumption andcelebration of newness. (This apotheosis of novelty is, in fact, apparent in thevery disciplinary formation, and the name, of “new media studies.”) In responseto this neophilic culture, Galloway argues that “new methodologies of scanning,playing, sampling, parsing, and recombining” may be less radical than a returnto older critical theories. In my own thought, writing, and design practices, Imaintain a sense that valuable insights can still emerge from a spirit of play,despite its unquestionable incorporation, in recent years, into what Gallowaycalls “ludic capitalism” or the “play economy.” I see promising forms of criticalplay available, for instance, in the work of serious game designers (andtheorists) such as Mary Flangan, Gonzalo Frasca, and Jason Rohrer.Nevertheless, Marxism and psychoanalysis prove extremely revealing, inGalloway’s expert usage, for the ways they expose the variable ideologiesinherent in new media processes. The interface effects that he traces alsosuggest, importantly, that ideology is itself a kind of conceptual interface — anopen-ended problematic rather than a problem to be solved.

Galloway ends his book on new media with a fascinating proclamation: “Nopolitics can be derived today from a theory of the new.” This conclusion may besurprising in that he does, after all, identify something “new” about digital media:they are an “ethic” and not, like the older form of cinema, an “ontology.”Nevertheless, the newness of the digital is not critical to Galloway. Newnessremains a logic of market accumulation, not rejuvenation. Thus, Galloway’sprovocation is this: “The world does not need new ideas. The challenge issimply to realize what we already know to be true.” Whether or not Galloway’sreaders accept this challenge, they will have to take seriously the questions heraises about today’s digital class, which does not merely consume butcommunicates, generates content, games, remixes, and mods, ceaselessly.Does a critical response to an always-on world require disengagement? Does itcall for active opposition? Does it suggest still more radical forms of play? Andhow, then — in a world made new and renewed, constantly, at the click of a keyor the swipe of a finger, in real time — do we access and mediate our situation?

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